radia season 34, show #518 (radio one 91FM. dunedin, new zealand), playing from march 2 to march 8, 2015.

Hours after Hours

by Samuel Longmore

This composition was recorded at night in six different rooms and liminal spaces within a certain building in central Auckland, New Zealand. The history, location and daily life of the building itself may or may not be relevant to the piece, but this set of conditions is as follows. This building houses the Audio Foundation, Auckland's most recognisable locational node of sound culture and experimental music. It was, formerly, a tie factory for a local manufacturer which, in an Antipodean bid for faux-continental sophistication, called itself Parisian ties. Now no neckties, and indeed hardly any clothing, are made in New Zealand. But the building is still busy working, nurturing a resolutely self-aware locality in regards to the sonification of place, with rooms containing a sound library, a gallery space, a small performance venue, studios and workshop spaces, an office and small shop housing hens-teeth rare local runs of multi-format limited edition pressings, as well as its own low power FM radio station, AFM.

These rooms were entered by the artist at night, with a microphone and a recording device. The gain was set to high and the microphone was left "to do its work", without guidance, the artist immediately leaving the scene, not monitoring the sound. In subsequent takes, the sounds of these room-ambiences, these (near) 'silences', were played back into the rooms, and re-recorded, creating an accumulative and self-referential circuit in which the resonant frequency of each room began to emerge. In editing the piece together from the resulting audio six separate rooms are sequenced together. Listening back to these, their subtle shifts, it is as though witnessing a mysterious formal experiment, the alignment of each room emphasizing the difference within the gesture's repetition, the magnification of the room-tone and the resulting 'presence of absence' undulating like waves. Signaled by no intermediary save the change in resonant frequency, the shifts subtly become a sounding-out of the dimensions of walls, staircases and other architecture, an aural mapping, a blind yet acutely aware material and physical cartography of the space which Sam describes as "an overall picture" of the space.

This work joins a compositional tradition of sound works exploring the resonant frequency of discrete spaces through repetition. Alvin Lucier's I am Sitting in a Room, through Jacob Kierkegaard's 4 Rooms. The absence of any kind of originating signal, as well as Longmore's explicit removal of his own body from the scene of recording, extends these practices toward an accumulating analysis of something that sounds close to silence, within the after-hours existence of rooms dedicated, in their everyday life, to sound. If Longmore's minimalism relies on an analysis of the formal aspects of recording, it is also deeply interested in the chaotic aesthetics of noise, the conflict between the non-intentionality of improvisation and the expectations of findings in compositional practice. Such a dialectic allows the emergence of traces, an uncovering of things normally inaudible. Perhaps that's why, in the absence of any signal to be obliterated, we might not be so surprised when these 'field recordings of the act of recording' themselves start to speak - to sing like choirs - at certain points. Or uncover, as Sam writes, "the tension between the resonance of each space and the non-existence of silence - the former always tending toward dominance with the latter inevitably cropping up a a disruption."

Samuel Longmore

Grounded in the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Samuel Longmore's practice and research occurs in the spaces where his interrelated concerns for the experience of aural perception, the phenomenology of architectural space, field recording as compositional action and the para-ontologies of sound:silence / signal:noise, overlap. The work of Merleau-Ponty affirms a position regarding the importance of subjective, corporeal perceptual experience which is central to his practical investigations, fueling an ongoing interest in the ephemeral and spatiotemporally specific ontology of sound. Sam has a BVA in Sculpture from the Dunedin School of Art. He now resides in Auckland and is working towards an MFA at the University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Art.

Sam would like to thank Jeff Henderson and Chris Cudby at The Audio Foundation for their support in the making of this piece.

“The Haystack” addresses modern practices for data gathering and surveillance, approached through the development of evolving sonic landscapes. Four chapters are compiled, each drawing from different methods of data monitoring, including tapped telephone calls, recorded conversation, the sonification of network traffic, and the internal sounds of communication technology itself. Haystack is the sound of dystopia, as told from the eyes of a machine.

For more work by Micheal Dean please go to https://soundcloud.com/m-dean-1

An attempt to work on hyper-stimulation’s impact on ourselves, and on the resulting mix of void and anxiety. This is not a technophobic production but an observation of the exhaustion that comes with a certain way of being in contact with the world – or how sounds and information become intruding and break in our intimacy.

radia season 34 – show #515 (radio x) – SAVUSAUNA
- playing from february 9 to february 15, 2015 -

SAVUSAUNAby LASSE-MARC RIEK

As a substantial part of Finnish life and culture, sauna has a considerably long tradition in Finland. Savusauna, the smoke sauna, is the eldest technique of preparing a sauna bath. In contrast to more recent sauna baths, no chimney is needed. A big fire is prepared and kept over hours under constant temperature – not to low, but also not too hot, to produce smoke. The smoke is filling and thus heating the sauna room. When the room is hot enough, small windows are opened to let the smoke escape and the sauna bath can begin.
Have you ever enjoyed a savusauna? You should. Lasse-Marc Rieks piece invites you to join a savusauna bath by listening. It’s really worth a try.

While Lasse-Marc Riek, being a specialist for field recordings, would for sure have been able to provide extra material to capture the atmosphere around the savusauna as well, we did not ask for that. His piece is complete in its on rights, celebrating the Finnish sauna culture of the everyday. At the same time, when it comes to sauna bath: how can we translate this experience into sound? Obviously, for several reasons this seems to be an almost impossible task. Or, to be more precise: what we might consider as the most natural translation would be always the most artificial part. For we’d loose track of what we are missing, what can’t be captured with the means of recording, due to the fact that the core experience is fuelled by substances that can’t be kept: smoke, heat, steam, sweat.

So we chose for our acoustic framework a good mixture of field recordings – some of which are so concrete that they might remind you of Foley sounds, the kind of sounds that are created for exactly this very kind of purpose: a substitute that may feel more real than the real one would. But is this really true? You’ll be able to find out anyway. But then we also have to be complete with our credits (see below), thus it is not really necessary to try. Yet, why not stop reading here. Listen by yourself first. And check the data later. It’s really worth a try…

LASSE-MARC RIEK
is an artist mainly working in the field of sound art, acoustic ecology and related interdisciplinary research, including cooperations with other artists as well
as scientist. He is also the co-founder of GRUENREKORDER, an outstanding label for phonography, sound art and field recordings. Over the past years he has been travelling north more but once, often returning with field recordings from the frozen world.
This winter he has spent some weeks in Finnland. And as it went to be quite cold outside he regularly enjoyed the savusauna.

credits:
great many thanks to LASSE-MARC RIEK for SAVUSAUNA! Moreover, special thanks to morosopher, gutek and muf211 for generously contributing their snow recordings, uploading them to freesound.org and donating them to the public domain!

additional info:
includes radia jingles (in/out), station and program info/intro (english)
intro credits: melting snow (2012) by muf211, snow effects (2013) by morosopher and snow removing (2013) by gutek, all donated to the public domain, on freesound.org

** English version**
For the Radia Show n°514, Jet FM gave “carte blanche” to Julien Quentel, visual artist from Nantes. This is what he wrote me to present his piece “The Promise” 2008-2015 :

—Hi Anne-Laure
All this will remain well enigmatic, as the dark of the night !
I have nothing to claim neither sound recording, nor technology, or an emotional bond with the place …
none of this, just what is left to listen, that the universe is in the night.—

A closed circuit formed by a loop that exploits the digital technology in VHS and a magnetic field, activated by the magnets of a powered speaker for the diffusion of audio. This system ensures the maintenance of an onanistic process that leads to constant and progressive disruption of the audio and video signal supported by the magnetic tape of the VHS. The residual audio, which gradually loses quality, is channeled into a mixing system and spread through the same audio speakers that degenerate the sound source itself.

This show was produced for Radio Papesse from the recordings of a performance held at xenos arte contemporanea (Firenze) in October 2014

Bio:Eddie Spanier
b. 50 ° 53 ’34.66′ ‘N, 136 ° 50′ 12:38 ” E 50 ° 53 ’34.66′ ‘N, 136 ° 50′ 12:38 ” E
He is an auto-generated intelligence swarm, a dense team of highly-trained space monkeys, skilled and ontologically devoted to artistic do-it-yourself processes, obsolete technologies and retrogaming, technological onanism and hypertrophic mechanical systems, pseudo-scientific dogma, subculture science, conspiracy theories and the former life of L. Ron Hubbard, the Day of Judgment, and popular culture. Eddie Spanier is a gray area, a gray eminence that often conspires against itself, a machine of propaganda and a parasite of free information.

Black Monk
It is a new moniker concealing the other half of the duo Alpin Folks, a musical project that blends the literary references and visual arts related to mountains.
Immersed in electronic listenings he gives space to the compositions of Steve Reich, Terrence Dixon and Helm. His records are a valuable asset for use as connective or degenerative material. Fascinated by the triptych word, sound, images, he works for the first time with Eddie Spanier, making four hands.

A voice, which becomes sexually indefinite, feeblish and apparently drained by alienation, faces up its situation in the form of an acoustic interior monologue. The shallows, which are represented by the voice, coagulate as a sound compilation of radio play clichés. Abrasively and bulky parts are combined with elegant atmospheric parts. The capitulation will win at the end. For now. To be continued…

More information about elffriede.aufzeichnensysteme and Jörg Piringer:

The Resonance Radio Orchestra was up in Scotland in August 2014 when Resonance104.4fm broadcast Remote Performances, live from Outlandia, Glen Nevis, in a collaboration between the radio station and artists London Fieldworks. This live radiophonic work is called Second Sketch for Ascent and Descent. It was written, arranged and produced by Ed Baxter, and features Ed Baxter (bass guitar), Tam Dean Burn (voice), Ewen Campbell (whistling), Miriam Iowerth (xylophone), Peter Lanceley (electric guitar, singing), Charlie Menzies (fiddle), and Michael Umney (piano). In November 2014 we asked eminent American country singer Bob Cheevers to read a script for a new work. At the end of that recording he improvised a fragmentary text which – since it fitted perfectly with the theme, unbeknownst to Bob – we’ve now combined with the other Remote Performances material as A Secret Postscript.

Slowless is a conceptual sound of elements of music slowed down beyond recognition with sounds retrieved from violin, vocals, synthesizers and other noise sounds from the city. This sound might be sound of any city you want it to be. Each city has its own unique sound, but anyone who works with the sound knows that every city has a inimitable soundscape . So let’s make a musical journey through the cities. Martin Georgievski is a conceptual artist, sound designer, musician, and graphic designer. Experimenting with different sounds of guitar, synths and field recordings, Macedonian producer Martin Georgievski a.k.a Amplidyne Effect creates an interpolation of ambient, experimental and electronic music, ranging from subtle drones to noise-rock. This is a piece specially produced for RADIA.fm inspired and dedicated to the city.